I'm right there with you. Thanks to my infant and a merciless cat, it's been a couple of years since I've slept past 4:30am. I try to get to bed early as often as possible, but it's hard to simply 'give up' and go to bed at the end of a long day when you've finally got a moment to yourself.
I'm in the same boat. Two children both under four and two cats. I used to be a real night owl. Now I'm in bed at 9:30 pm almost every night.
Cats are better now. We have confined them away from our bedroom At night and we used a water spray (fine mist) which put them off scratching at the door. After a week or so of getting wet they stopped scratching.
Tried the old water spary trick on our oldest child when she kept waking me up at 5 am. Didn't work. Made her cry.
Do you have an automatic feeder for the cat? I use the Crown Majestic (search on Amazon) and it works pretty well--my cat stopped sniffing my face at 6am...
I bought the same feeder in the hopes that this would occur, but it seems my cat just can never get enough. So I run into the trade off between health (my cat's) and sanity (my own). I would still suggest the feeder to everyone to try however, it really is a well made product that could easily fix bad habits in your animals feedings.
My threshold for the number mornings the cat on a diet begins the wake-up call is rapidly approaching the point at which I get around to building some sort of time-release RFID tag access-controlled (two cats, only one on a diet) feeder.
Thanks for the suggestion. We leave food out all night, so it seems to be less about wanting to be fed than wanting (me specifically) to be up and downstairs.
Oddly, our teenager did the "sleep in" thing for about six months, now he bounces out of bed at 6:45 most mornings and 6:00 when he is going to rugby training!
My school offered a few tracks. The earliest track had you out of school earlier, but classes started at 7AM. Everyone took that track at my school because people could get out earlier and do things when it's still light outside. I regularly woke up at 5:30AM with no trouble. It's not really uncommon for teenagers to wake up at 6AM. For some weird reason that changes in college, and everyone gets lazy and sleeps in. (despite college usually offering superior choice of schedule)
